\n<\/p>\n
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published.<\/p>\n
If you have information about cases or investigations paused or dropped by either the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, contact Corey G. Johnson at [email\u00a0protected]<\/span> or 917-512-0287.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.<\/p>\n The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.<\/p>\n Louisiana\u2019s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses \u2014 sometimes for decades \u2014 rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.<\/p>\n Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.<\/p>\n Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration\u2019s retreat from the department\u2019s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump\u2019s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n \u201cThis administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,\u201d said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. \u201cIt\u2019s unquestionably disappointing.\u201d<\/p>\n The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ\u2019s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.<\/p>\n The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.<\/p>\n The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.<\/p>\n Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.<\/p>\n The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.<\/p>\n \u201cRegardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation\u2019s top civil rights enforcer,\u201d Noureldin said.<\/p>\n A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.<\/p>\n The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump\u2019s appointee to run the DOJ\u2019s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.<\/p>\n In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to \u201cunelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.\u201d<\/p>\n Dhillon attends an April meeting of the Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.<\/span><\/p>\n A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.<\/p>\n Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can\u2019t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,\u201d Noureldin said. \u201cA federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.<\/p>\n Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as \u201cDJ Rob\u201d in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.<\/p>\n He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.<\/p>\n Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn\u2019t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.<\/p>\n \u201cI lost everything,\u201d he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. \u201cI\u2019m ready to get away from Louisiana.\u201d<\/p>\n Louisiana\u2019s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana\u2019s court clerks, sheriff\u2019s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.<\/p>\n Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff\u2019s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.<\/p>\n Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker\u2019s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state\u2019s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department\u2019s investigation, which she called \u201cfactually incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,\u201d Murrill stated.<\/p>\n Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a \u201ctimely and correct fashion.\u201d Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.<\/p>\n \u201cThe system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,\u201d Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.<\/p>\n Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill\u2019s claims. <\/p>\n William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.<\/p>\n \u201cI have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,\u201d Most said. \u201cAnd it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that\u2019s the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n After Breonna Taylor\u2019s high-profile killing in 2020, the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden found that the Louisville Metro Police Department used excessive force and discriminated against Black residents.<\/span><\/p>\n South Carolina\u2019s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.<\/p>\n After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services \u2014 required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision \u2014 to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.<\/p>\n The DOJ report didn\u2019t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina\u2019s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state\u2019s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.<\/p>\n South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.<\/p>\n Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.<\/p>\n Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren\u2019t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,\u201d said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina\u2019s oversight.<\/p>\n South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn\u2019t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.<\/p>\n After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.<\/p>\n South Carolina\u2019s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ\u2019s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people\u2019s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.<\/p>\n \n Idaho Schools Consistently Break Disability Laws. Parents Say They\u2019re Not Doing Enough to Fix the Problem.<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.<\/p>\n Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people\u2019s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,\u201d Tissot said. \u201cMost importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published. If you have information about cases or investigations paused or dropped by either the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, contact Corey G. Johnson at [email\u00a0protected] or 917-512-0287. The Trump<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[6970,2346,1414,6968,6969,848,1811,247,702,122,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-13276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-carolina","9":"tag-civil","10":"tag-doj","11":"tag-halted","12":"tag-lawsuits","13":"tag-louisiana","14":"tag-major","15":"tag-propublica","16":"tag-rights","17":"tag-south","18":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n Credit: <\/span>
\n Ken Cedeno\/Reuters\/Redux
\n <\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI Lost Everything\u201d<\/h3>\n
\n Credit: <\/span>
\n Xavier Burrel\/The New York Times\/Redux
\n <\/span><\/p>\nTrapped in Group Homes<\/h3>\n